“Ben, you mean to tell me that old man would fetch down a raid on us just because Papa wouldn’t—”
“A raid? Him? They wouldn’t move an inch for him.”
“I heard he’s virtually one of ’em!”
“They’d have killed him long ago if he wasn’t crazy. They bat him around, and misuse him, and take his stuff away from him—you saw the horse they left him with. But let him scout for them? Hell! They’d never believe a word out of him.”
“Then why are we so set on killing him?”
He hadn’t seen it coming. He had dug his own trap, and galloped straight into it. He opened his mouth, and closed it, and for a moment wouldn’t look at her.
I’ve got him, now. I’m within one inch of the truth, right this minute. Ten seconds more, and all this mystery will be over….
But Ben balked; he could think of no dodge, but he balked anyway. He met her eyes, not with candor, but with plain obstinacy. “Horse thief,” he said shortly, and shut his mouth like a trap. He knotted the stirrup-leather lacing, finished or not, and took his saddle by the fork, to go out.
She was beaten, and she knew it. Nagging him would serve no purpose. She asked him, “Does Seth ever come here, Ben?”
He stopped. “Maybe. I don’t know. We find tracks where Indian ponies come and go; sometimes moccasin tracks, close in. He could have been here a lot of times. Why?”
“Want to see what he looks like.”
He said with a startling intensity, “I pray God you’ll never see his face! Because if you ever do, there’ll be war paint on it.”
He left her; and she was disheartened as she thought how near she had come to a glimpse behind a dark veil. They were coming no closer together. He would go on treating her as a sister, even thinking of her as one, probably, until Rachel herself made known to him that she was undeceived. But he was preoccupied and edgy all the time now, so that the time never seemed right.
Ben had been wrong about one thing. Seth came the next day, without war paint, and in plain light.
Chapter Eighteen
Texans always called him Seth. Even when they tried to say Set-Tayhahnna-tay they couldn’t get the singsong gobble to it that a Kiowa would understand. He had been no more than a fable when Abe Kelsey first called him Seth, a riddle, in an old man’s tale. But since then he had become a reality to be dreaded, in his own right. There were other white and nearwhite warriors, such as Red Hair, Kiowa Dutch, and Kiowa Frank, and perhaps many more less widely known. All of these had been captured, enslaved, and finally Indianized, when very young; only one or two of them remembered their native speech. The Kiowas had no chiefs, either hereditary or elected, nor any other constituted authority with powers of discipline. A war chief was any man who could scheme up a raid and persuade others to follow him. The white war chiefs had made their names in open competition, by the boldness, ingenuity, and ruthlessness with which they made war on their own race. Most believed the white warriors more savage than the Kiowas of blood, but this was because of the resentment aroused by their anomaly of race. They could equal the cruelty of their adopted people; they could not hope to exceed it.
On the day Seth came, Ben left the others hauling water to the house, while he rode circle alone to read what news of the night had been written upon the prairie soil. He was back in twenty minutes, and had the up-horses moved to the corral nearest the house, where they were covered by its guns. Then he brought Andy and the hands into the house and forted up. The battle shutters had been opened to let in the first sun, but now they were barred again. They pried the plugs out of one shutter loophole at each of the two windows facing the Dancing Bird, and opened two loopholes in the door.
Two cowhands were put up at the window loops. The one called Tip was gangly and hatchet-faced, and in this situation was tense enough to ring like the blade of a knife. His eyes darted about the room, and came to rest on the fireplace. “Ain’t that chimney pretty big?”
“It’s got iron hooks built into it, big as scythe blades,” Ben told him. “The buck that jumps down it will stay there.”
Mama was puttering in a cupboard, pretending that nothing was happening; but she was careful to make no noise, except for a soft, almost tuneless humming, that was rapidly working on Rachel’s nerves. She tried to think of some way to tell Mama to stop, but none came to her. She opened the ammunition chest under the rifle rack, got out a handful of rim-fires, and took them to the cowhand called Joey. He was a tow-headed, Dutchy-looking boy, with white eyelashes, and China blue eyes which he was too shy ever to raise to Rachel. He thanked her without looking at her.
Suddenly everybody was motionless and silent, a man at each loophole, with no places left over from which to see out. Mama stopped her humming and held perfectly still, her hands idle in the cupboard. Ben said, “Ground your carbines, you fellows. I’ll kill the man who shoots before I tell him.” Perhaps they didn’t know him well enough to be sure whether he would do it or not. He seemed so relaxed and easy, even pleased with the whole situation, Rachel was not sure she knew him herself.
He spoke now in a queer, soft tone. “Sis…Speak of the devil. You want to see what Seth looks like?…Let her look, Andy.”
What she saw was astonishing. Three Indians sat their ponies on the near bank of the Dancing Bird, in full view of the house at less than fifty yards. They were recognizable at once as Kiowas; their strong, flat-stomached build, prepotent in the Kiowa blood no matter how diluted, could not be mistaken for that of any other Indian. They carried carbines in their hands, but wore no paint, no headdresses. They rode light Indian-made saddles with elkhorn trees or none, and the tails of their ponies were blowing free, instead of clubbed for battle. In all ways, these three were equipped for travel, not for fighting.
“There’s fifteen or twenty more of ’em around someplace,” Ben believed. Kiowa warriors would take any risk to put you off your guard. “He’s a whopper, isn’t he? Big as Satanta.”
She knew then, for the first time, which Seth was. You couldn’t tell he was a white man, at the distance. Kiowas came in as many sizes as white men did, but when they were big, they were big all over, heavy-limbed, but never paunched like a Sioux or Comanche.
“Carbine, Andy,” Ben said, still casual, still as if pleased, but concentrated, now. He reached back without turning from the loophole, and Andy put his own Spencer in Ben’s hand. After working with Andy all his life, Ben did not need to ask if a ball was chambered. “I’m going to waste one,” he said, raising his voice to reach Tip and Joey. “Now don’t be poking your muzzle out! I’ll tell you when.”
Ben took aim unhurriedly, but fired without delay. Rachel saw the Kiowa ponies stutter their feet, yet they were held in place so closely that their riders only swayed lithely at the hips; their heads and shoulders were not displaced an inch. The three remained relaxed, and Rachel saw that they were grinning. They glanced at each other, before their eyes returned to the house. Seth raised his right hand in the peace sign.
Rachel was awe-struck. “Medicine,” she whispered. “They think they’ve got bullet-proof medicine!”
“Not them,” Ben said. “I know all three. The one to the left of Seth—there’s a tough one! That’s—that’s—” he tried a Kiowa word—it sounded like G’yee-tau-tay—under his breath. “Wolf Saddle, I guess you’d call him.” Kiowa names were shifty to translate; this one might mean “Rides a Wolf,” or “Wolf on his Back,” for all Ben knew. “And the other—” he hesitated again. Traveling Hawk? Wandering Eagle? “That’s Lost Bird,” he settled for. “Meaner than Seth himself, if that’s possible. Those buggers know what they’re doing.” He handed the carbine back to Andy. “They even know what I’m doing,” he added.